Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster Read Free Book Online Page B

was set in a grim, inward-looking expression, it never crossed my mind that he would do anything to break that trust. That’s probably how Isaac felt when Abraham took him up that mountain in Genesis, chapter twenty-two. If a man tells you he’s your father, even if you know he’s not, you let down your guard and get all stupid inside. You don’t imagine that he’s been conspiring against you with God, the Lord of Hosts. A boy’s brain doesn’t work that fast; it’s not subtle enough to fathom such chicanery. All you know is that the big guy has placed his hand on your shoulder and given it a friendly squeeze. He tells you, Come with me, and so you turn yourself in that direction and follow him wherever he’s going.
    We walked out past the barn to the tool shed, a rickety little structure with a sagging roof and walls made of weathered, unpainted planks. Master Yehudi opened the door and stood there in silence for a long moment, gazing at the dark tangle of metal objects inside. At last he reached in and pulled out a shovel, a rusty lug of a thing that must have weighed fifteen or twenty pounds. He put the shovel in my hands, and I felt proud to be carrying it for him once we started walking again. We passed along the edge of the near cornfield, and it was a splendid morning, I remember, filled with darting robins and bluebirds, and my skin was tingling with a strange sense of aliveness, the blessing of the sun’s warmth as it poured down upon me. By and by we came to a patch of untilled ground, a bare spot at the junctureof two fields, and the master turned to me and said, “This is where we’re going to put the hole. Do you want to do the digging, or would you rather leave it to me?”
    I gave it my best shot, but my arms weren’t up to it. I was too small to wield a shovel of that heft, and when the master saw me struggling just to pierce the soil, let alone slide the blade in under it, he told me to sit down and rest, he would finish the job himself. For the next two hours I watched him transform that patch of earth into an immense cavity, a hole as broad and deep as a giant’s grave. He worked so fast that it seemed as if the earth was swallowing him up, and after a time he had burrowed down so low that I couldn’t see his head anymore. I could hear his grunts, the locomotive huff and puff that accompanied each turn of the spade, and then a volley of loose dirt would come soaring up over the surface, hang for a second in midair, and then drop to the pile that was growing around the hole. He kepi at it as if there were ten of him, an army of diggers bent on tunneling to Australia, and when he finally stopped and hoisted himself out of the pit, he was so smudged with filth and sweat that he looked like a man made of coal, a haggard vaudevillian about to die with his blackface on. I had never seen anyone pant so hard, had never witnessed a body so deprived of breath, and when he flung himself to the ground and didn’t stir for the next ten minutes, I felt certain that his heart was about to give out on him.
    I was too awed to speak. I studied the master’s rib cage for signs of collapse, shuttling between joy and sorrow as his chest heaved up and down, up and down, swelling and shrinking against the long blue horizon. Halfway through my vigil, a cloud wandered in front of the sun and the sky turned ominously dark. I thought it was the angel of death passing overhead, but Master Yehudi’s lungs kept on pumping as the air slowly brightenedagain, and a moment later he sat up and smiled, eagerly wiping the dirt from his face.
    “Well,” he said, “what do you think of our hole?”
    “It’s a grand hole,” I said, “as deep and lovely a hole as there ever was.”
    “I’m glad you like it, because you and that hole are going to be on intimate terms for the next twenty-four hours.”
    “I don’t mind. It looks like an interesting place to me. As long as it don’t rain, it might be fun to sit in there